The Letter
by AureliaAndMidnight
Summary: Tamlin finds a note after the war ends. Not a Tamlin/Feyre story.
1. Chapter 1

It was a miserable morning in the Spring Court. The sun was shining and the birds were chirping, and all that nonsense. The beautiful halls of the manor were just as perfect as ever. The roses outside were still blooming and spreading their delicate fragrance.

Tamlin hated it. All of it.

Especially the roses. Their perfume choked him as he swept through the empty halls, every blossom and bud a cruel reminder of _her_.

He saw her everywhere. She shone in every painting adorning the walls of the manor. He could smell her whenever he saw the roses outside. Every time he walked into his study, he remembered the look in her eyes as the table slammed into her. Fear, anger-and something else. Why hadn't he seen it? Why hadn't he seen Rhysand's spark of malice inside of her? Had he truly been so blind?

He ripped the paintings from the walls one morning. He shoved them into a closet somewhere, claws out and shredding a few of the canvases. He couldn't care less what happened to them-every single one of them was a reminder of her betrayal.

He couldn't stand the color red. It reminded him too much of his old friend-of Lucien. It reminded him too much of Amarantha. It reminded him too much of the blood streaking down her face from the cut on her cheek-the cut he had given her. The cut she'd _wanted_ him to give her.

Manipulative, conniving, ruthless. Truly, he thought bitterly, Rhysand's equal in every way.

Tamlin sat alone at his table, forcing food down his throat. There was no one else at the table. There was no one left.

His sentries-the few still serving him-kept out of his way. They knew his temper all too well, a temper that had driven out the love of his life and his best friend.

Because Lucien had chosen Feyre over him. Because Feyre had chosen _the High Lord of the Night Court_ over him.

He had given so much for the two of them, only for them to leave him all alone.

He knew, deep down, that ambition hadn't been the reason she left him to wander his now-empty halls. She had never been ambitious, not one of the snakes that tried to worm their way higher in his court. No, once upon a time, she had been content with love.

Had she?

Tamlin had his doubts. He didn't know her anymore. He still loved her, of course, and would likely always love her, given how his heart would twinge painfully whenever he saw her. He hated himself for every insult he threw her way, pretending that the female in front of him was not Feyre. It was a twisted and corrupted beyond repair version of the female he'd fallen in love with. She couldn't be Feyre-Feyre was the woman who had sold her soul Under the Mountain to save him. Who had loved him and sacrificed so damn much for him. _Feyre_ didn't use water to almost drown High Lords. _Feyre_ didn't bring down courts from within.

 _Feyre_ didn't love Rhysand.

No. Only this shadow of her did.

Damn you, Rhysand. Damn you to hell. He slammed his fist down onto his study desk, sending papers flying.

 _But had it really been all Rhys?_ his traitorous mind whispered. Maybe, when Amarantha snapped her neck, something else had snapped. Had made her cruel, cold. Had made her Rhys's mate.

Sometimes, Tamlin wondered if he hated her. If he hated her for leaving him for another male, for stealing away his best friend. For killing his priestess (even though he couldn't really fault her there).

He wondered if he hated her for leaving him alone to his house full of ghosts.

On the bad days, he did. He cursed her name and ripped things to shreds with his claws. He was left alone to his tantrums, to tear apart his manor and himself.

It hurt like hell to be alone, he realized.

Tamlin often looked over his shoulder, searching for the red-haired lord. Lucien had been the crutch he leaned on when his duties threatened to topple him.

Lucien had always been Tamlin's check, keeping his temper from clouding everything he saw. Now that he was gone...

The few remaining residents of the Spring Court had usually one of two opinions about their ruler. Either they were contemptuous and disdainful, or they lived in fear of his volatile temper.

Feyre had left the Spring Court devastated in her wake. Lucien would have found a way to fix that.

Then, one day, he stumbled across one of her old paintings in a storage closet. It was a painting of roses, serene and quiet and perfect. He remembered it well. He remembered her painting it, not too long after Hybern.

It was a pretty lie, he thought.

But deeper in the closet, he found more paintings. Paintings that made so much more sense. Dust swirled around him as he uncovered painting after painting.

There was another canvas depicting a rose garden, like the first. In this one, the roses were rotting and decayed, the petals slashed and torn. A shadowy figure in the distance stood triumphantly over the destruction that they had presumably wrought.

Another showed...her. She was striding away from the study, piercing eyes blank and blood running down her cheek. She leaned on Lucien, gazing up at him. He was there, too, behind them. His own face was devastated and sad.

Tamlin remembered that day, too.

Feyre had painted the shadow of the Bogge as it battled Dagdan and Brannagh.

She has painted her and Lucien, tangled up the night he had stormed into Lucien's room to find the two of them in each other's arms.

His breath caught as he stared at the last painting in the pile. It was a painting of a beautiful city, full of light and life. A river wound through the middle of the city. Mountains framed the scene.

And in the corner, vaguely drawn, was the silhouette of two figures. The taller of the two had their wings wrapped around the second figure, a shorter silhouette with female curves. He flipped it over gently, almost reverently. There was a note pinned to the back.


	2. Chapter 2

Some part of him wanted desperately to shred the paper, the canvas, and the rest of the paintings. This was the part of that wanted to erase her from the manor and from his heart.

But he loved her far, far too much for that.

With shaking fingers, Tamlin pulled the note off of the canvas, opened it, and started to read.

 _Tamlin,_

 _I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I'm writing this now to clear some things up, because I know that you're angry. That you hate me. That you have questions._

 _I didn't know I was Rhys's mate until months and months after I left. I never touched him the way you might think I did until then. When I left, I thought that I was just taking a break to let you sort everything out._

 _I didn't want to hurt you._

 _It sounds like utter bullshit, but it's true. I never left the Spring Court with the goal to screw you over. It was strange—the longer I was away from you, the angrier I became. I was so, so angry that you hadn't noticed my wasting away, that I was in deep shit and needed someone to pull me out. Remember when I said I was drowning? I was. I was drowning in guilt and in sorrow and in self-hate._

 _Amarantha didn't just snap my neck, you know._

 _All I wanted was for you to bring me back to the surface. But when you locked me in, I fell apart completely. The Morrigan carried me out, and, with Rhys, I began to put myself back together. It's not that he fixed me—he helped me fix myself. He isn't the male you think he is. He's kind, he's caring, and he will do everything to keep the people he cares about safe. In that way, the two of you are ironically similar. You probably won't believe me, but I needed to tell you. I need you to understand. Not even to forgive. But to understand, Tamlin._

 _And then Hybern happened._

 _I wanted to bring you down, brick by brick, because of how far you went to get me back. I_ hated _you for what you did to the people I love._

 _See, I haven't forgiven you either. But I get why you did it._

 _There's one more thing I have to say to you, and it's about Lucien. He still wants to be your friend._

 _He went to the Night Court to get his mate back, the female he loves back—not for me. He was angry at me, too, you know. And he was right to be._

 _I wasn't planning on bringing him, on stealing him away. But just as I was about to leave, Ianthe was about to do horrible things to him. Horrible, horrible things. I couldn't-wouldn't leave him to that._

 _That's all. For what it's worth, I'm sorry._

 _Feyre_

Tamlin's green eyes filled with tears.

"I'm sorry, too," he whispered, choking on the words. "Damn it, Feyre."

He wept, shoulders shaking, until he had no tears left to weep.


	3. Chapter 3

Feyre was on the roof of the townhouse in Velaris, sketching the bright, busy streets below. First the horizon, then the buildings, then the hazy outlines of the people...crap. The graphite in her pencil had broken. She tossed it to the side and reached down into her bag for a new one, but instead of brushing against familiar, rough wood casing, she felt the feathery edge of a paper note.

Curiously, she pulled it out. It was blank.

"One of Rhy's notes, maybe?" she wondered aloud. But he had always written on them first.

She shrugged. Couldn't hurt to try writing something. She rummaged around for a pen, scribbled a quick _Hello?_ , and waited. The paper disappeared.

 _You found it. Thank the Cauldron,_ the paper said when it came back.

 _Who the hell is this?_

The note didn't return for a while. When it did come back, the first letter had an ink-soaked blot at the beginning, the result of a hesitant pen resting on the paper. There were multiple scribbled out words that Feyre couldn't read. Interesting.

 _Someone who wants to apologize. In person._

Feyre snorted, and wrote back, _By the Mother, Tamlin. Was it so much work to write your name?_

It was ages before the paper came back, by which Feyre had already gone into the bedroom she shared with Rhys. He was away on some official business and she had elected to stay behind, and she was about to blow out the candle when the reply came.


	4. Chapter 4

Feyre sat, cross-legged, on a log. Kudos to Tamlin for picking an appropriately neutral location, she thought wryly. As she waited, she played with water. Her latest favorite shape to conjure was a centipede, since all of the little legs were fun to animate.

She felt his presence before she scented him. He felt foreign, _wrong_ , in the ancient air near the sacred mountain of Prythian.

Brushing herself off, Feyre stood up to meet him. She knew she could beat him in a fight, if it came to that, but she hoped that her confidence would not be her undoing. It could be a trap.

Or, she thought, it could be the beginning of the end of the feud between the Night Court and the Spring Court.

Tamlin came through the trees and saw her, stopping dead in his tracks.

Feyre resisted the urge to fiddle with the buckles on her sword belt. "It's been a while," she said. The war had ended months ago.

"It has," he said. His eyes were quiet. Not cold, but not seething with rage like they had been.

"Loneliness isn't a good color on you," Feyre observed. He stiffened.

Slightly disappointed, Feyre relaxed. "That's it, isn't it. That's why you're here. Look, if you want Lucien back, you should probably—"

"I'm not here for Lucien," Tamlin said quickly, and squeezed his eyes shut for an extra-long blink. "I really did come to apologize. Feyre, I'm sorry. For what I said, what I did...I'm sorry."

They stood there in silence for several minutes, letting the birdsong fill the gap.

"Hey," Feyre said, playing with a water-centipede on the ground, studiously avoiding eye-contact. "Do you think…" she paused. Why not jump in the deep end? "Do you want to see Velaris?"

Tamlin's head shot up from where he had been watching her centipede. "What?"

"Velaris. The City of Starlight. I mean, it's not a secret anymore. I want to show you why."

Why. The unspoken ending to her sentence hung in the air—why she loved her court so, and why the Spring Court had never been and never would be enough.

"I couldn't." Tamlin shook his head.

Feyre understood—after all, she hadn't expected him to say yes.

"Do you want your paintings back?" he asked suddenly. "The ones you left in the closet?" His offer surprised her. She thought he had torn them up in a rage when he found her note, because it would have been a very Tamlin thing to do.

Clever, clever male. The paintings might have been an excuse to see her again, the manipulative bastard.

But maybe...maybe for once, she should take the offer at face value. It was an olive branch, and she was happy to take it.

"Sure, Tamlin."


	5. Chapter 5

"Meet back here?" he asked. Tamlin's face was unreadable, but Feyre knew his tells well enough. _Nervous. Unsure. Emotions the poor male hadn't felt in a long time._

Feyre took pity on him and nodded. "When?"

"Tomorrow, sundown?" Tamlin said, tentatively.

"Sure. See you then," Feyre replied, and winnowed away. Back to _Rhysand_ , and _Velaris,_ and the _Night Court._ Tamlin felt the bitterness in his chest like a weight. Damn, it hurt.

He wanted to be angry. He wanted to grow claws and shred the trees around him, wanted to roar loud enough to scare the birds from the trees. He didn't know why.

But he couldn't. He was too tired to be angry.

Tamlin decided he liked this feeling of emptiness better than anger.

* * *

"Here," Tamlin said, holding out a bundle of paintings in his arms. He hadn't brought all of them—he'd kept the one of the rotting roses and the one of her and Rhys in Velaris. He wasn't quite sure why he couldn't bring himself to let those two paintings go, yet he had kept them in the dusty closet.

"Thanks," Feyre said, smiling slightly. Tamlin's heart split in two. That smile. The last time she had smiled at him, and _meant_ it, had been...damn, it had been before Amarantha. Before Clare Beddor.

He would have fallen to his knees and started crying right then and there, but Feyre suddenly twisted around and threw up a shield of air. Dark claws raked across the bubble. "Shit," Feyre swore. "Come on!" She grabbed his arm and tried to winnow them away.

But they remained in place. The shield held for another attack. "What the—" Tamlin started, but by the time he had said "hell", Feyre had shifted into full battle mode. The woods had gone dark, as if something had blocked the sun. Everything had gone quiet but for the snarling of the animal beyond Feyre's protective dome.

"I'm going to count to five. At three, shift. At four, I'll drop the dome and light this place up. At five, we attack." Feyre's eyes were cold and determined.

Tamlin opened his mouth to object, but Feyre had already started counting. _Mother help me, she's a completely different person,_ Tamlin thought.

"One." The claws swiped the dome again.

"Two." Tamlin's claws punched through his skin.

"Three." He shifted, a prowling animal in Feyre's dome.

"Four." Feyre lit up and created a wave of Dawn Court light that swept through the immediate area, and Tamlin recoiled at what little of the monster he had managed to glimpse. The dome dropped.

"Five!" Feyre cried, and moved forward, a knife already in her palm. Tamlin pounced.


End file.
